The world's biggest ship – for 53 days

They use these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistlock

gCaptain has some good photos from the MV Rena sinking which show how much abuse they can take before failing.

http://gcaptain.com/incident-photos-week-rena/

They are attached to each other and the ship via some mechanism that interacts with their corner castings. (Each corner has a box with slots in it.) Turnbuckles, twist locks, rails, etc are used to secure the containers.

See http://www.pacificmarine.net/marine-deck/cargo-securing/cont... for some options.

Is that a ship? I was under the impression that these floating LNG processing vessels were platforms that have no self propulsion capability.

We have been here before.

1. That is will be

2. This: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Schelte isn't quite as long, but quite a bit larger in tonnage (around 50%, IIRC) (pictures at http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/1376740/Pieter-Schelte-co...)

3. There is a small chance the container ship and the Pieter Schelte will meet in Rotterdam soon.

Well, the sheer scale of the ship obsoleted their previous comparisons to teakettles.

Indeed. Have you ever wondered how many tablets or baked beans you could fit on the worlds largest container ship?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-30700269 (Also published in the metro today)

I find that there are two extremes--never enough pictures or too many pictures and not enough description of what I'm looking at. D'oh!

I used to work on large container ships. Have some pictures, mainly of the engine room:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cybergibbons/sets/721575943247...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cybergibbons/sets/721576000001...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cybergibbons/sets/721575943431...

I think you should visit a terminal. The cranes used to load and discharge containers are massive. Often much bigger than any existing vessel as the vessels keep getting bigger. See for instance cranes being shipped on a vessel: http://www.schoonerwoodwind.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/c.... Now try and discharge+load e.g. 1000 containers.

In your suggestion did you consider:

  * how would a smaller ship be able to offload a much bigger ship
  * speed of loading+discharging matters a lot and a smaller ship will be much slower
  * where to store the containers
  * impact on transhipment

There are vessels with cranes on them, those are usually not full container ships but more like vessels which mostly handle trucks+cars plus occasional container or breakbulk cargo.

The latest terminal in Rotterdam has switched to working remotely with camera's because it has become impossible to put anyone on a crane, see e.g. following video. Dutch, just look at the monitor screens they're using: http://nos.nl/video/2011857-wereldprimeur-in-rotterdamse-hav...

It could be done at sea, but it would add too much time and time is extremely valuable with ships this expensive. These ships make money transporting goods, if they aren't moving containers they're losing money.

It's a bit slow and inefficient, and also dangerous to do it at sea. So this is done only if space in the port is at premium.

Which means only Hong Kong still does this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-stream_operation

There are containers in the hold, and then more containers stacked on top of them and on the deck. All modern container ships are built this way.

Refrigeration is done within containers - some containers have their own refrigeration units.

In case you're asking for an order of magnitude, the last vessel presented on HN talked about 10 levels of containers outside and 11 inside.

I recommend at least looking at the pictures. And they're building 20 of those ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476222

http://alastairphilipwiper.com/blog/building-largest-ship-wo...

It looks like this inside the hold:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cybergibbons/278358038/in/set-...